In September 2021, I began my PhD project ‘Co-creating Virtuosity’ at the Grieg Academy — Department of Music, University of Bergen. Soon after, I joined the Composition Research Group led by Dániel Péter Biró. In conjunction with the group’s activities, I gave a presentation on the contemporary accordion for composition students and faculty and held several individual sessions with composers who wished to learn more about the instrument’s repertoire, playing techniques, and my collaborative experiences. It was during this period that I began working with Francisco Corthey (*1991), a student in the International Diploma Program in composition at the Grieg Academy.
Although he had never previously written for accordion, Francisco expressed a strong interest in the instrument and in exploring it through a collaborative process. I introduced him to my artistic and research perspectives, which center on understanding music as a co-creative act — a process in which composer, performer, score, and instrument are all distinct agents [1] in the production of musical meaning (D’Errico 2018; De Assis 2018; Östersjö 2008). Francisco agreed to participate in my research project, and we began a series of collaborative sessions.
Our meetings were documented through audio and video recordings and culminated in the premiere of Francisco’s composition ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’ [‘we are fine, but I am trembling’] on 24 February 2022. This was followed by further performances and reflections over the subsequent months (see Fig. 1).
Initially, I sought to investigate how my relationship with my instrument, my ‘corporeal-performative thinking’ (Dogantan-Dack 2015: 171), and my music-instrumental knowledge informs the emergence of musical meaning within a composition communicated to me in form of a score. However, as the collaboration developed, my focus sharpened toward the relational field between learning and unlearning in my practice. I became increasingly interested in how these processes shaped my evolving narrative as a performer and influenced the real-time unfolding of the music.
This led me to explore the notion of deconstruction within the context of performance. Drawing on John D. Caputo’s conversation with Derrida (1997), I understand deconstruction not as a critique or dismantling of meaning, but rather as a process that exposes the inherent instabilities and openness of practices we often assume to be fixed: to show, as Caputo writes, that no practice has ‘definable meanings and determinable missions’ (Derrida 1997: 31). Beyond this philosophical framing, I was particularly drawn to Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s notion of Musikalische Dekonstruktion (2002). For Mahnkopf, musical deconstruction involves a conscious design of form through the coexistence of multiple, potentially divergent structures. Rather than relying on a single formal principle, deconstructive composition is shaped by structural intersections and tensions. Importantly, Mahnkopf suggests that these divergences are not accidental but intentionally embedded within the form, allowing the composition to unfold as a process rather than a fixed architecture:
The fundamental idea of musical structuring (Strukturbildung) consists in working with more than one structure. This is by no means trivial. In all previous musical thinking, the musical structure of works has been conceived unambiguously. No matter how differentiated and multi-layered it may be, all internal distinctions always serve a common structure, from which alone the central dimensions of meaning, work identity, and sonic realization are determined. A work — […] a ‘piece’ of music — is identical with itself and should be performed as what it is. The hermeneutic differences in interpretations of the same work are oriented toward the ideal of a center of meaning (Sinnzentrums), and even the sonic realization is oriented […] toward fidelity to the work. The fact that this self-identical musical structure […] is being broken open (incidentally, a long-nurtured longing) is not simply a theme in musical deconstruction, but rather a call to action. (Mahnkopf 2002: 246, my translation)
In translating Mahnkopf’s concept into my performative practice, I began to see performance not as the reproduction of a single, coherent structure (the score), but as a real-time negotiation between co-creative agencies — score, body, instrument, space, and memory — each carrying its own logic. The act of unlearning, then, was not simply a negation of prior knowledge but a deliberate shift toward engaging with the fragility of performance as a generative condition. Deconstruction, in this performative sense, meant allowing music to emerge through the intersections of multiple systems of knowledge and experience — technical, embodied, sonic — rather than through the mastery of any of them. By taking apart my practice within a co-creative context of a specific composition, I wanted to see if my artistic agency as a performer can thus be reassessed, in terms of ‘exceeding the boundaries’ (Derrida 1997: 31) of the performer’s role in Western classical music.
To reflect through this process, I employed an autoethnographic approach with some elements of grounded theory, allowing thematic patterns to emerge from our documentation and my reflective notes (Corbin and Strauss 2008). To articulate the evolving phases of co-creation, [2] I adopted Graham Wallas’s four-stage model of creativity (Wallas 1926). Though originally developed in psychology, this model and its modifications have been successfully applied to structure creative collaborations. Particularly relevant was Barbara Lüneburg’s thesis (2013), which draws on a modified version of Keith Sawyer’s creativity model (2012) to structure a performer’s collaborative practice. In my work, Wallas’s model offers a process-oriented framework that embraces both structured planning and intuitive emergence. In his book The Art of Thought (1926), Wallas outlines four stages of the creative process:
- Preparation refers to the phase of curious, conscious engagement, during which material is gathered, developed and explored.
- Incubation follows as a more passive stage, giving an opportunity to reflect ‘on other subjects than the proposed problem, or to rest from any form of conscious thought’ (Wallas 1926: 11).
- Illumination is the moment when a new insight, connection, or direction suddenly emerges.
- Verification involves testing and contextualizing insights through practice, performance, or reflection.
While Wallas’s model might at first seem linear, I use it here less as a strict sequence than as a flexible framework to trace the evolving aspects of co-creation throughout the development of ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’.
The graph on Figure 2 visualizes the timeline of our collaboration through the lens of this model, showing how artistic reflection and experiential practice were interwoven.
This exposition retraces the unfolding of the collaboration, showing how an initially undefined artistic encounter between performer and composer evolved into a specific musical work, and how that process transformed my understanding of virtuosity, composer–performer relationships, and musical meaning. Through the gradual dismantling of habitual practices and the emergence of new performance strategies, I reflect on how deconstruction became a generative force — not in the score alone, but in my embodied, real-time navigation of musical space.
[1] The words ‘agent’ and ‘agency’ are used in terms of Actor Network Theory and Bruno Latour: ‘Within ANT, agency is extended beyond human intentionality. An agent is plainly understood as “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference”[…]. [W]hat matters is not the intentionality itself but how intentionality is shaped (allowed, encouraged, blocked, rendered possible) by an extension of causal relations between humans and nonhumans. From an ANT perspective, rather than being passive resources at the disposal of humans, nonhumans are active, vibrant agents that also exert power’, write Dwiartama and Rosin (2014), quoting Latour (2005: 71). See also Sayes (2014).↩︎
[2] I use the term ‘co-creation’ to emphasize the shared responsibility and mutual awareness between composer and performer in producing a musical outcome (Gorton and Östersjö 2016; Taylor 2016; Hayden and Windsor 2007). Unlike collaboration, co-creation involves a broader range of agents contributing to the production of musical meaning, highlighting the embodiment in sound and social interactions surrounding performance (Henshaw 2022).↩︎